Uncut’s Top 50 of 2011; One Year On…

If you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms after the glut of end-of-year charts last month, I cooked this up for the latest edition of Uncut…

If you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms after the glut of end-of-year charts last month, I cooked this up for the latest edition of Uncut…

Do end-of-year lists come out too early? Do they miss a lot of good albums released after votes have been submitted? And how much do our tastes change over time? To try and answer some of these – admittedly anal-retentive – questions, we decided to conduct an experiment. One year on, would our writers’ Top 50 of 2011 have changed much? Again, the Uncut team filed their votes, to produce a chart that we’ve placed alongside the original list below.

As you can see, the Top Three remains the same, but there are big surges of support this time for Tom Waits and Kate Bush, whose albums hadn’t been heard by the entire electorate at time of voting. The Black Keys’ “El Camino” is a new entry (released December 5, 2011). The biggest loser, meanwhile, appears to be the Drive-By Truckers’ “Go-Go Boots”, dropping from Number 19 to nowhere, in a bout of Americana decks-shuffling. Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling and Josh Pearson plummeted, too.

What does it all prove? Perhaps that, as a rule, our decisions about the best albums stay reasonably consistent, and that in an ideal world, with more flexible deadlines, we’d publish our lists later. Oh, and that there are few things music journalists enjoy more than compiling charts…